A tribute to all that it never performed its design objective in anger.
How old is the oldest flying example ?
......or by accident....
....
http://www.history.com/news/document-reveals-1961-nuclear-close-call-over-north-carolinaOn January 23, 1961, a B-52 Stratofortress bomber patrolled the night skies over the Atlantic Ocean. It was three days after the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy, and with the Cold War in a full freeze, American bombers such as this one carrying a pair of 3.8-megaton Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were kept airborne at all times to defend the country. Many hours had passed since the B-52 took off from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base near Goldsboro, North Carolina, when something suddenly went wrong on the routine Strategic Air Command training mission.
Fuel started to gush out of a leak in the plane. Nineteen tons of fuel were lost in just two minutes. As the pilot attempted to limp back to Goldsboro, the right wing suddenly sheered from the plane. The bomber plunged into a tailspin and began to break up. Six of the eight crewmen ejected. As the plane spiraled to earth, the bombs, each of which were 260 times more powerful than the nuclear weapon dropped on Hiroshima, broke loose and plunged to the ground as well. Five of the men who were ejected parachuted to safety; the other three crew members were killed in the crash.
When responders arrived on the crash scene 15 miles from Goldsboro, they discovered one of the nuclear weapons had landed in a field with its deployed parachute tangled in the branches of a tree. The second bomb had anything but a soft landing. It became entombed after striking the ground at nearly 700 miles per hour
